29 May 2012

By Jason Miller at Social Media Examiner:
Are you looking for simple, straightforward metrics to measure the impact of your social media efforts?Social networks and blogs continue to dominate Americans’ time online (accounting for nearly a quarter of total time spent on the Internet) according to a recent Nielsen report on social media, .
While we all know how important it is to market through the various social networks, it is vital to track and measure your efforts for success.
Here are five simple metrics to find out whether your social media effort is paying dividends.

#1: Examine Referring Traffic

Under the Traffic Sources tab, click on Referring Sites and then type in your social network of choice to see how much traffic is being referred. Set up goals based on the actions you want your visitors to complete.Quick Tip: For Twitter referrals, search both Twitter and t.co, which is the built-in Twitter link shortener.

Increasing
referral traffic from social sites is a good indicator that your social
efforts are moving the needle in the right direction.

#2: Review the Quality and Relevance of Content

Content is the fuel for your social media engine, but if it’s not relevant and useful, it’s a waste of digital space.

The correct way to assess the value of a piece of content
is not by continuously checking every five minutes to see if your
retweet count goes up or if someone comments on your blog. These “vanity
metrics” give a false sense of hope that your content is generating
leads for your brand or business.
Instead of judging the success
of your content by the feel-good double-digit share button, pull back
the curtain and see what’s really going on.

For each piece of content you create, monitor unique page views, time on page and total pages viewed.
If unique page views go up, that’s an indication that your reach is
growing, increased time on page shows that your content is interesting
to the visitor and increased total page views means your visitor wants
to learn more by clicking on other pages around your site.

You can easily track these three mentions within Google Analytics
by clicking on the Content tab, then choosing Overview. This will give
you a snapshot of your top pieces of content along with detailed metrics
including page views, unique page views and time on page. Drilling down
into your content with Google Analytics is a great way to determine which content is resonating with your audience.

#3: Look at Share of Voice

With social media, share of voice refers to the number of conversations
about your company versus your competitors/market. The value of online
customer and prospect interaction can be tied to the share of voice
(SOV) metric, which I like to call “The Big Picture Show.”

Segment brand mentions by social channel to uncover opportunities for improvement. You may find that your efforts on one particular channel are going unnoticed, but excelling on another channel.

The
formula for calculating SOV is simple: divide the number of
conversations or mentions of your brand by total number of conversations
or mentions about other brands in your market.
To get your total number of conversations you can use a free tool such as SocialMention or if you have the budget, a more robust tool such as Radian6 has a widget that can calculate this metric for you.

Share of voice: the number of conversations about your brand versus your competitors/market.

#4: Track the Total Size of Community and Engagement

Measuring
and tracking the size of your collective communities is essential in
determining whether you are adding value through your social strategy.
Using a social CRM tool is a great way to integrate customer data with social profiles and interactions while monitoring growth and engagement levels.

Social CRM tools such as Sprout Social aggregate your activity into one easy-to-view dashboard where you can quickly see whether your strategy is moving in the right direction.
Sprout offers a pretty good view of your basic metrics, including
engagement and total size, and even goes a step further with
recommendations for influencers to focus on.

Social CRM tools are an easy way to manage and track your profiles and activity all in one place.

#5: Measure Sentiment

Sentiment
analysis is imperfect at best, often ignoring the human element of
sarcasm or simple context. To be completely accurate, you need to track this manually.

Go through your mentions and tag them as positive, neutral or negative. Add up the totals and measure over time. Are the good mentions growing and the negative mentions decreasing?

Sentiment analysis can be thought of as "opinion mining."

Track Your Social Media Return on Effort

The
social metrics used to determine success are the ones that make sense
for your business and that you can tie back to your marketing bottom
line.

Building a simple dashboard manually or using a social CRM tool as mentioned above is an easy way to track and update these metrics on a weekly or monthly basis. You can then monitor trends and set goals for growth based on what’s working.

If your metrics are not moving in the right direction or seem to be stalled, try mixing up your messaging and experimenting with different posting times and frequency.

What do you think? Does your business measure ROE? Which metrics are most important to your social strategy?